View full sizeMary Simmons speaks at a news conference on Thursday, May 12. 2011, about a lawsuit alleging that the Mobile County School system improperly suspended her great-grandson without allowing him to defend himself at a hearing. Brenda Juarez (left), a professor at the University of South Alabama looks on along with Jadine Johnson and Marion Chartoff, who are lawyers with the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Brendan Kirby/Press-Register)

MOBILE, Alabama — A Montgomery-based civil rights group today filed a federal lawsuit against the Mobile County school system, alleging that principals have imposed long-term suspensions on students for minor infractions without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

The lawsuit, filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of five Blount High School students and one from Scarborough Middle School, seeks a court order reinstating a policy that the school board eliminated last year requiring a hearing before a student can be suspended for longer than 10 days.

The lawsuit also seeks summer school or other programs to allow the students to make up lost work in order to advance to the next grade on time, and it seeks certification of a class action suit on behalf of all county students who have received long-term suspensions without a hearing.The lawsuit seeks legal fees but does not request any monetary damages.

“Kicking students out of school for long periods of time without being given a chance to defend themselves is unacceptable and unconstitutional,” said Jadine Johnson, an attorney for the organization.

Roy Nichols says student rights are upheld

Schools Superintendent Roy Nichols said school policy does allow suspended students a hearing. He said the system notifies parents if their children are to be suspended for longer than 10 days and schedules a hearing before an official from the student services department.

“There’s no question that we have been aggressive about making sure students behave themselves in class,” he said. “But we’ve been just as aggressive about protecting the constitutional rights of the students.”

Mary Simmons, whose great-grandson was suspended from Blount for showing up late to lunch, said at a news conference that the child was a good student in elementary school and talked about plans to go to college until he entered ninth grade this school year.

“From the start, it’s like they had it out for him,” she said. “He kept getting suspended for little things. ... It’s like they didn’t give him a real chance to go to high school.

Marion Chartoff, the director of the Alabama Education Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said officials’ approach to discipline has worsened the system’s higher-than-average dropout rate. She noted that the school system has taken a number of steps to improve that problem.

“But they’ve not addressed one of the biggest, if not the biggest, problems — the student pushout crisis,” she said.

Many students suspended for minor violations, lawsuit says

According to the civil complaint, the 65,000-student school system suspends more than 10,000 students at least once every year. Many are for dress code violations, being late and other minor infractions. Citing data from the U.S. Department of Education, the lawsuit states that eight schools, including Blount, have suspended more than half of their students.

Students who are suspended are eligible to attend an alternative school, but the lawsuit contends that as of March, there was a waiting list of 50 to 60 students.

Nichols said he could not immediately confirm whether the suspension statistics cited in the complaint were accurate. He said he suspects some of them are counted more than once, with multiple suspensions imposed on the same students.

Chartoff said many of the suspended students did not do what they were accused of but had no chance to make their case. She said Simmons’ great-grandson, for instance, attended an earlier class and went back to retrieve a jacket. When he arrived at lunch, Chartoff said, the student was told he was being suspended.

The students named in the lawsuit, identified only by their initials, are:

A 14-year student who was suspended for the rest of the school year in February when he arrived late to lunch at Blount.

An 18-year-old student who was suspended in January for being late to class.

An 18-year old student with a disability who was suspended in January for being late.

A 17-year-old student who was suspended for having a shirttail untucked.

A 17-year-old student with a disability who was suspended in August for the rest of the semester for not having an identification badge at school.

A 13-year-old student was was suspended for the rest of the year in March for skipping a class at Scarborough Middle School.